The following is one of our most popular What’s In Your Watershed articles in the Ebb and Flow archive. It was written by Luis Martinez. It was a hot humid afternoon, just another workday in the Richmond Greenway Bioswale for The Watershed Project's Green Collar Corps. I was tending the trees when something caught my eye in one of the leafs in a maple tree. At first glance this leaf looked unusually slender and kind of beat up-as if it had been chewed on by a pest. But as I got closer, I noticed this "leaf" was not a part of the tree but a Praying Mantis. Stagmomantis californica, …
Ebb & Flow
The Newsletter of The Watershed Project
Rock The Bay 2022
Hi Watershed Lovers! We are excited to invite you to join us for The Watershed Project’s 25th Anniversary Party and benefit concert. We will have a taco bar, beer, wine and great music by Barrio Manouche for a night of rumba and flamenco gypsy jazz. Rock The Bay: Celebrating 25 Years of Watersheds and Communities will be a fun and engaging opportunity to reconnect with our community after we come out of the pandemic years. We will bring our supporters, partners, alumni, and the community at large together to celebrate 25 years of accomplishments and look towards the next 25 …
Blast From the Past – Rainwater Harvesting
TWP’s rainwater harvesting adventures began over a decade ago when we taught our first Watershed Teaching Tools workshop for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission in 2010. That’s when The Watershed Project first crossed paths with Kat Sawyer (who is now our Greening Urban Watersheds Manager). Kat had just completed the installation of a rainwater harvesting system at McKinley Elementary, and TWP was looking for a SFUSD school with a rainwater system to host our teacher training featuring rainwater catchment as a teaching tool. It was the first of many collaborations with Kat to offer …
The Watershed Project Welcomes New Community Engagement Manager
The Watershed Project is proud to announce and pleased to share a little bit about our new Community Engagement Manager, Naama Raz-Yaseef. Below, Naama answers a few questions about community, her favorite park, her passions and her experiences that led her to The Watershed Project. What watershed do you live in and why is it special to you? I live in the Wildcat Creek watershed. Now I get to live and work in the same watershed. I think that’s pretty special! I became a TWP staff only three weeks ago, and since, I have already taken part in two of our creek cleanup projects and …
Connecting with Nature: Students’ Reflections
By Cecília F, Clover F, Danica M, and Pranshi B At The Watershed Project, our mission is to inspire San Francisco Bay Area communities to understand, appreciate, and protect our local watersheds. One of the ways we connect bay area communities to their local watersheds is through education. Over the past year, the education team at TWP has had the opportunity to work closely with students from TK-12th grade, discussing a range of topics from the water cycle to climate change to green infrastructure. One of the schools we have had the pleasure of partnering with this year is Olinda …
Blast From The Past: Early Earth Days
It is always an exciting time of the year when we get to celebrate Earth Day and we enjoy seeing all the happy faces of the community making a difference and coming outside to help in a positive way make a small but significant difference. At the Watershed Project, we cherish the possibility of teaching and learning from the community around the shared activities we design and facilitate to take place in many corners of the West County Watersheds. It was the year 2000, when a group of neighbors joined The Watershed Project’s at the El Sobrante Library Earth Day to remove oceans of ivy …
A Safe Routes to School Project in RIchmond: Implementation Phase Starts on Earth Day
By Juliana Gonzalez Walking to school should be a stress free process. We all have idyllic images of happy kids skipping along the sidewalk along the caregivers sharing stories and enjoying the fresh air as they go back and forth from school to home or to their afterschool activities. Childhood should be filled with joy and imagination. As we try to restore some sense of normalcy (after the pandemic) for all elementary students in the Richmond communities, we are ready to pitch in and do what we can to ensure that those moments of childhood wonder are joy. That is why after many …
Hope Gardens 2022!
By Dan Kirk and Paula White This year marks the 4th year of what we call “Hope Gardens”, a partnership between community members in North Richmond and The Watershed Project to re-imagine and utilize spaces between the sidewalk and street by planting native and/or drought tolerant plants. Apr 8, 2022 was the first planting of the year, with volunteers and community members working together to dig, plant, spread mulch and water. During the end of the workday’s closing circle, volunteers described the day in a few words: wonderful, enriching, inspirational, educational and fun. We love this …
